This week has been a slightly confusing week. I started off working on one project but then I completely hopped ship to another. Originally I was going to build an Arduino spider robot which would operate on servo motors in it legs and could either be controlled on a phone by Bluetooth or on a preprogrammed path. But then after doing some research and learning how to use the servo motors I came to the conclusion that trying to do that project would be really dang hard. So I took on an old shop project instead. A 3D Zoetrope.
I started the project by doing some research on 3D zoetropes and I learned that the way they operate is by having a platform with 3D figurines all posing in different frames of an animation. The platform would then spin with lights flashing on top of it perfectly in sync with the platform making the illusion of an animation. I was taking over an old zoetrope someone had started in the past but did not get far in. The body and lights had been soldered for me so I have to take over the wiring, coding, and finishing of the project.
First I got the lights working early on in the week which didn't prove too difficult. There are 24 1 watt LEDs in this project which draw a lot of power if they are to be visible. I had to connect a AC to DC LED driver. The driver would take the AC power from the outlet and convert it to 12v DC. The code was fairly simple just some delays in the loop function to turn it on and off. The LEDs however required a mosfet which I learned how to use. A mosfet will act like a switch so when it is powered it cuts off the circuit and when unpowered it lets the circuit flow again.
Today I wired up the motor and coded it to spin which also sounds simple but took some time because I had to reteach myself how to wire and code the motor. Overall this week has been moderately productive and next week I hope to add speed control to the motor using a potentiometer. Doing so will let the user manually calibrate the zoetrope to get the motor speed and LEDs synced up.
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